The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The “Hero’s Journey” is a type of narrative structure that focuses on a hero who embarks on a grand adventure, overcomes a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and returns home victorious or significantly changed by the experience. This trope is especially prevalent in mythology and in contemporary fantasy literature, both of which share an emphasis on quests and fantastical elements. In children’s literature, canonical examples of the hero’s journey can be found in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), among many others.

Each book in The Chronicles of Narnia is an example of the hero’s journey structure. Indeed, almost every story revolves around one or several protagonists who enter Narnia through a magic portal, undertake a quest to right a wrong or defeat an evil enemy, and eventually go back to their own world with new maturity and confidence. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in particular, the evolution of Eustace Scrubb from a sullen, spoiled boy to a decent human being exemplifies the transformative power of the hero’s journey, and true to form, Lewis employs a uniquely Christian twist as the catalyst for the character’s internal changes.

Eustace begins the story as a bit of an anti-hero: a narrative archetype defined by a notable lack of morality or positive qualities. Indeed, although he is one of the novel’s protagonists alongside his cousins Lucy Pevensie and Edmund Pevensie, Eustace is initially depicted as arrogant, selfish, and rude, and at the beginning of the voyage, he never misses an opportunity to make himself an unpleasant nuisance. When he is brought to Narnia against his will and forced to go on a quest with his companions, he follows them reluctantly until his selfish actions precipitate an intense spiritual crisis, at which point he is transformed into a dragon and realizes just how isolated and miserable his actions have made him. When Aslan symbolically baptizes him and strips away his outer shell of dragon skin, Eustace is returned to his true form. Afterward, he begins to change for the better and becomes an archetypal hero. When the ship is attacked by a Sea Serpent, for instance, the boy does “the first brave thing he [has] ever done” (65) and stabs the creature with his sword. In the end, when Eustace leaves Narnia after successfully completing the quest, the omniscient narrator notes that “back in our own world everyone soon started saying how Eustace had improved” (142), and thus the ending of the novel conforms to the typical hero’s journey.

Notably, Edmund goes through a similar narrative trajectory from antihero to hero in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), and he alludes to this previous adventure when he points out to his cousin, “Between ourselves, you haven’t been as bad as I was on my first trip to Narnia. You were only an ass, but I was a traitor” (60). In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the focus on Edmund is decreased significantly from previous installments, as he has already learned his lesson, and it is Eustace’s turn to undergo a spiritual transformation and take center stage in this and subsequent novels in the series. In this story, however, the hero’s journey is strategically combined with the antihero-to-hero transformation in order to demonstrate Lewis’s underlying Christian symbolism. Eustace begins as a flawed character who develops a strong sense of morality and undergoes a lasting transformation through his adventures and direct encounters with Aslan. In Narnia, being good is defined as having faith in Aslan (as exemplified by the behavior of Lucy, Caspian, Reepicheep, and others aboard the Dawn Treader), whereas being evil is defined as straying from Aslan’s rule (as demonstrated by the Lone Islands’ decision to enslave people or the old dragon’s decision to wallow in greed). Set against this backdrop of implied morality, the hero’s journey in this novel depicts a character whose behavior changes for the better because he experiences a spiritual awakening, thus revealing Lewis’s underlying allegorical message.